The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Homegoing: A Novel

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the castle's women's dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery.

Queen Sugar: A Novel

Why exactly Charley Bordelon's late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her 11-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles. They arrive just in time for growing season but no amount of planning can prepare Charley for a Louisiana that's mired in the past: as her judgmental but big-hearted grandmother tells her, cane farming is always going to be a white man's business.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to previously untapped data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

Swing Time

Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited but never quite forgotten either....

Between the World and Me

"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race", a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past.New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up - a place where slavery's legacy was felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence.

Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine

One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with racial identity, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans. When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center.

The Sellout: A Novel

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

Behold the Dreamers (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself; his wife, Neni; and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty - and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Audre Lorde pioneered "biomythography" in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, originally published in 1982. In this extraordinary tale, Lorde weaves a narrative tapestry out of the threads of her own life - from her family's immigration to New York through her own coming of age - and the lives of the women who shaped her.

I Almost Forgot About You: A Novel

In I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young's wonderful life - great friends, family, and successful career - aren't enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage', historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she wrote, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.'

The Book of Harlan

The Book of Harlan opens with the courtship of Harlan's parents and his 1917 birth in Macon, Georgia. After his prominent minister grandfather dies, Harlan and his parents move to Harlem, where he eventually becomes a professional musician. When Harlan and his best friend, trumpeter Lizard Robbins, are invited to perform at a popular cabaret in the Parisian enclave of Montmartre - affectionately referred to as "the Harlem of Paris" by black American musicians - Harlan jumps at the opportunity, convincing Lizard to join him.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas

Reporting from the potholes midway through life's journey, Allen addresses these and other more serious matters, like the rude awakenings of being single after 25 years, of mothering a teenager, and of living with a serious illness. She also discusses life's everyday trials, like the horrors of attempting a crafts project, the anxieties of being a houseguest, and the ever-changing rules of recycling.

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause, "Nothing." Dyson believes he was wrong. In Tears We Cannot Stop, he responds to that question. If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

One of the comedy world's fastest-rising stars tells his wild coming of age story during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Noah provides something deeper than traditional memoirists: powerfully funny observations about how farcical political and social systems play out in our lives.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

In this biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson depicts the improbable life of the controversial writer whose novels confront sexuality, racism, and social injustice. In absorbing detail, Jackson explores Chester Himes's middle-class origins, eight years in prison, painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and escape to Europe, where Himes became internationally famous for his Harlem detective series.

Notes of a Native Son

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.

Chokehold: Policing Black Men

Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread - all with the support of judges and politicians.

Publisher's Summary

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

Born in upper-crust black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the 19th century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty". Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the Civil Rights Movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America - Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Are you black enough? Are you white enough? Are you female enough? Are you male enough? Are you American enough? Margo Jefferson’s memoir is a perspective on growing up in America. Jefferson is born in 1947. She is raised in Chicago by two professional middle class parents; i.e. one is a doctor; the other a teacher. What makes Jefferson’s memoir interesting is her middle class upbringing. It sharply defines answers to many questions rarely asked by Americans.

Jefferson wrestles with many of the same baby to teenage insecurities all Americans face in their generation. However, there is an extra layer of complexity for Jefferson because of her color. Jefferson lightly touches on the history of slavery and its societal consequence but she personalizes that history in explaining how she became Margo Jefferson, an accomplished theatre critic, and professor.

Wilmore is unfairly criticized for his tart-tongued stand-up when thought of in light of Jefferson’s memoir. The last part of Wilmore’s presentation seriously praises Obama’s accomplishment and then uses a pejorative word for black Americans to categorize Obama. Wilmore’s comment seems badly interpreted. Wilmore is saying Obama is great enough to be both the President of the United States (in the sense of acceptance by all Americans) and black (in the sense of being accepted by blacks). Jefferson’s memoir, and Wilmore’s routine show that being American enough, black enough, white enough, male or female enough, is just being a part of the human race.

I started this memoir thinking it would be a shallow read full of pretension. Not so. This author was able to illustrate a life some blacks don't believe exists but does. I see now that while the author was raised with advantages most blacks didn't have at the time, but some of the disadvantages that can come with being black are also visited upon her. Respectability doesn't save her from the same prejudices and obstacles other blacks face. Especially if others see that not all blacks behave the way you've been taught. Indeed there is more than one way to be black and this is but one way to do it. This is exposure to that life albeit indirect exposure. But if someone's horizon,be it a black person or a Person of another race, is expanded , maybe we won't be so quick to judge by shallow superficial criteria. When I started the memoir I know that I did

I recommend this to all peoples. We are all composes of diverse influences. The historical references in this work were most insightful no matter what package you come in. None us exist in a nomothetic

I consider myself in between the "hood" and negroland. I am a Black woman fair complexion but with unmistakable black features (long but not "good" hair, thin lips but broad nose... ). I am masters level educated yet I my friends and family are largely high school educated and have no "professiinal connections; nor have they been groomed by parents in social graces. I am a professional yet I still maintain work (part time) in a field I trained into from the military more than 25 years ago.

I found it difficult to stay interested in this story as written and as narrated. I wondered if the audience for this book was for high brow intellectual who could easily navigate without having to seek intent and understanding of vocabulary. quite often. this was a group choice of which I am the only one of 12 to finish the entire read (including some intellectuals...lol )however, I have always been interested in class issues within groups; especially African Americans.. this memoir provided another unique view from a member of the "upper" class Black folks. I did find her thoughts, recollections and insights. very insightful. as for the narrator, I love her acting but for t h is book I did I'd not like the fit. purely a personal preference as others had no problem with it.

I enjoyed the memoir, was a bit disheartened by her comparison of her self to the characters in the book the Little Women. Thoroughly enjoyed how the first chapters were delineated by years. All in all a good book, going to share with some who I think will have a lot to say when comparing to their own up bringing.

I struggled at first to like this book. But the sum of its parts makes it worthy. I enjoyed the lense of a child making sense of what her upbringing meant through the African American & feminist perspective.